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I knew him only by his reputation as a pioneering pediatric surgeon in Pennsylvania, as well as by his recent appointment by President Ronald Reagan as the 13th U.S. surgeon general. When Chick came to Washington for confirmation hearings, he unexpectedly met a tremendous amount of opposition from liberals and advocacy groups who took issue with his pro-life views. The confirmation hearings were so intense that Chick felt ill and was sent to see me at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), where I was an internist. Thankfully, there was not anything physically wrong with Chick, just that he had been under such great strain. All it was, I told him, was a bit of the “welcome to Washington traumatic stress disorder.”

We joked about the encounter for years, as we became personal friends and professional and scientific collaborators. Once Chick had made it through his confirmation hearings, his primary focus was an anti-smoking campaign; he issued harsh warnings about the dangers of tobacco use, and during his tenure smoking prevalence dropped from 33 to 26 percent of the population—a decline many attribute, at least in part, to him.

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But it was through Chick’s work on HIV/AIDS that he and I grew close. At the time, the disease was so new that even he did not know much about it. By a quirk of fate, his house was on the campus of the National Institutes of Health, where NIAID’s facilities are. (In fact, I can see the house out my office window.) Early in his tenure, he began making a habit a couple of times a week of walking in on me at my office around 7:30 or 8 p.m., while I was often working late.

“Got a few minutes to chat?” he would ask, his imposing 6-foot-1 figure and Ahab beard peering down at me. Then, he would stay for half an hour or an hour, asking me questions about HIV, which I and other scientists at the NIH were then studying. Through our discussions, Chick developed his own keen interest in the disease, which would lead to one of the most dramatic, and important, moments of his nearly eight years as surgeon general.

Chick had a vision of sending a letter out to more than 100 million American households to educate people about the basic facts of HIV. The White House signed onto the idea but provided scant resources. As the public would soon learn, Chick had put together a bold report, talking openly about homosexuality, anal sex, commercial sex work and injection drug use as they related to the spread of HIV/AIDS—topics a conservative presidential administration did not want coming out in a government document. Frustrated that he did not have enough funding to send out the report, he talked with me about arranging an interagency transfer from the NIAID budget (which is quite substantial) to the far more modest budget of surgeon general’s office. NIAID transferred a small amount of money, and the report was distributed, advocating not just abstinence and monogamy, but also safe sex and sexual education, to fight the AIDS epidemic.

Anthony S. Fauci is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. This article is based on an interview with Politico Magazine.